Writings

Falseness close to kin

The picture necessarily fails both its maker and its subject matter. As painful as that sounds, it's actually ok: as a new thing in the world, the photograph is not to be judged by fidelity to mind...

While walking with Mark Steinmetz

Who better to roam the French capital with than Mark Steinmetz, author of Paris in my time? We started our conversation over breakfast in a bustling café in Montmartre and then made our way to the ...

On hope

Past experience (the self) and the current moment (the world outside the self) come together in a creative moment that only exists because of our hope, because we realize the possibility of bridgin...

I lost it

A moment of unexpected loss is accompanied by a Lucinda Williams song . . . which invokes Vic Chestnut . . . who then summons Wallace Stevens and his "fabulous blackbird / Of thirteen stages." Afte...

While walking with John Gossage

A couple months after our publication of John Gossage's A Dozen Failures, we talked with John about that title, some of his previous projects, and the history of photobooks running from Atget to Ev...

The forest for the trees

I’d always thought of the title of William Eggleston’s The Democratic Forest as a sort of mischevious redundancy. Left to its own devices, a forest is a model of democracy, and it can hardly be ot...

Intuitions of unity

My copy of Beauty in Photography is pretty heavily underlined throughout, and nowhere more than in the title essay. But with all the marks and margin notes I’ve made, there is only one instance of ...

Some things I really liked this year and one I didn’t

Books are fun. Music is fun. People are fun (lots). Pictures are fun. Lists are fun. This past year was fun, for the most part. Here are a few things that gave me hope in 2015.

I remember

I remember writing these words, from the play In the Park by Edgar Oliver, in my notebook immediately after I saw him perform the piece last summer: Longing is the only magic of which we are capab...

The spirit of the case

Judy Fiskin says that Walker Evans succeeded where his FSA boss Roy Stryker failed "because Evans settled for art. Stryker succumbed to the false promise of photography, strove to represent litera...

The bees

Mark Strand, the late Poet Laureate for the Library of Congress, once wrote about the passionate feelings engendered by family photographs, noting that, in contrast, "When confronted with images o...

Miles from our home

"[The photographer's eye is] a dreaming eye: quick to seize the instant in which the fortuitous dance of forms reveals the essential truth, the ineffable thusness of the object. Only in such momen...

Auto care, sincerely

"Personal and historical associations, irrational attachments and affections, to take their place as legitimate elements of the aesthetic experience,” wrote Dr. L.A. Reid in "A Study in Aesthetics...

A round and about

"You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate. When anybody asks what a story is about, the only proper thing is to tell him to read the story . . . I myself prefer to say that a story...

Luck

Of all the gifts my father has given me, which are considerable indeed, the greatest may be that of close, direct attentiveness (the “natural prayer of the soul,” according to Benjamin), at least o...

Verse chorus verse

“Most artists make art precisely because they feel some sort of absence or incoherence in their lives. It seems not simply inevitable but necessary that the art they produce in some way seek to co...

Natur vs Nurtur

Michael Schmidt always looked at the world uncompromisingly, painfully, even brutally. In his final book, a restless mind finds some measure of peace, confident in its status as a mind, as a uniqu...

Mysteries of the unexplained

Interesting photographs typically raise more questions than they answer. And sometimes those questions are utterly unanswerable – not because they are murky issues of opinion or interpretation, but...

Sweetness follows

When I first saw some pictures from Nicholas Nixon’s “The Brown Sisters” – probably almost 20 years ago – I dismissed the collective as a gimmick. I thought just about anyone could come up with th...

The heart is attached

The photographer John Myers once said: “The world is not beautiful – it is there.” The part of me that took a Zen Buddhism class back in college – and learned of non-attachment – couldn’t agree mo...